Songkick launches iPhone app to connect location to concerts

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I have a confession to make. I’m a fan of live bands, but what with one thing or another, I just don’t get to see enough. I signed up to all the obvious sites to get emails about upcoming gigs. I don’t read their emails. I’ve scrobbled and playlisted and put in my preferences multiple times on numerous sites. Do I go back to visit? No. What I’ve been waiting for is an app which you can pull out in front of friends when they say “Yeah, let’s go and see [band name]…” on the spur of the moment. This would be the ‘last mile’ connection to bands and where you are.

But no apps on the iPhone have got substantial traction for concert discovery. Ticketmaster/LiveNations’ app is only in the US, only presents Ticketmaster concerts and iLike’s ‘local concerts’ app has been in life-support mode since they were acquired by MySpace. The odd thing is movie discover apps like Flixster have had 30 million downloads. You would think an app for concert discovery would make sense then, right?

This will allow users to track their favorite bands’ concerts, browse live music listings by location, and share concert plans. The Songkick Concerts app scan all the music on your device, auto-detects your location, and creates a personalised list of concerts for your favorite artists in your location.

“It feels like a big opportunity so we’re excited to see what people make of it today, It’s been by far and away our most demanded feature from users” Ian Hogarth, Songkick CEO and co-founder told me.

Crucially it leverages your location. Aside from that you get a concert calendar, push notifications when a new concert is announced for your tracked artists, all the concert info and all ticket options, and sharing to Facebook, Twitter. You can add new locations etc.

Because Songkick is not tied to one ticketing provider you can browse 100,000 concert listings from over 70 countries.

One app that may suffer is Gigkick, a third party app which uses Songkick’s API. However I gather the developer there is well aware of this new Songkick app and is working on a different set of features. One thing I would add from that to the official app though is the map.